Almost two-thirds of A-roads are unsafe, and highway authorities are not doing enough to reduce the risk of collisions, according to a government-backed review of Britain’s strategic roads.
For the first time, the annual EuroRap survey has assessed the relative safety of all the country’s 45,000km of A-roads, and concluded that 60% fail to rate as safe, meaning that the risk of a fatal or serious collision is medium to high.
Despite this, only 2% of the roads analysed where there was data for 2002-2007 had seen a significant reduction in the number of those killed and seriously injured (KSIs).
The Road Safety Foundation received Department for Transport (DfT) funding to carry out the review following DfT concern at the ‘considerable variations in the level of safety on different parts of the road network’.
The DfT urges, in its draft new road safety strategy for local highway authorities, to ‘rapidly improve safety’ on those roads that the Road Safety Foundation identifies as being the riskiest. However, while the Road Safety Foundation highlights redesigning junctions, anti-skid treatments, and new signing, lining and markings as the best ways of improving safety, the DfT, by contrast, emphasises the need to reduce speed limits on the riskiest roads.
The UK’s highest-risk roads are single carriageways, and eight out of 10 of the persistently higher-risk roads are in northern England.
The majority of the ‘persistently higher-risk’ roads – where there was little or no change in the number of fatal or serious collisions over the five years to 2007 – were also the highest risk roads for motorcyclists.
These are typically rural single carriageways through, or on the way to, national parks and coastal areas.
An analysis of the riskiest roads not involving motorcyclist accidents reveals more crashes involving junctions and pedestrians and cyclists. Heading this list is the A675 Higher Walton to junction three of the M65, a commuter route.
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